Ghosts in Segovia

Cockle-pickers at Morecambe Bay, Lancashire, UK

A car trapped by the tides at Morecambe bay, 400 meters from shore

Ai Qin Lin, who survived the Morecambe bay tragedy, and main character of the film

Ghosts is the way illegal Chinese immigrants and local British workers call each other. Ghosts is also the name of the documentary shown in Segovia last Sunday at the Hay Festival.

It is the true story of a group of 23 illegal Chinese workers that were killed in Lancashire, UK, in 2004. Nick Broomfield, the Director , said that there are 20 millions slaves in the world right now. He also has created a foundation to collect the half a million dollars the relatives of the killed worker have to pay the lenders. The film is an excellent example of art and politics interacting without contaminating each other: the suspense sequences are one of the best ever shoot.

I first knew about this tragedy few weeks ago while asking Rod Morgan (author of the Oxford Handbook of Criminology) about the exploitation of immigrants in the UK. Do not miss it, it is in DVD.

Global or Western Crisis?

Photo by El Adelantado de Segovia

There is not a better way of coming back to work (and reality) than to plunge into the Hay Festival in Segovia. Global Crisis: is the world economic system out of control? was the event held on Friday.

At the beginning, the moderator Adam Austerfield (LSE) said that people blame them (economists) for the crisis, and that that was unfair. I agree that economists are not the only to blame as almost everybody finds extremely difficult to think about the way we all think. The root of the crisis is exactly there: current western mentality in which we all are involved.

This crisis is consequence of thinking that mathematics, which is at the base of economy, is able to solve human problems stand-alone. On Friday, in Segovia, the ideal of humanity as a balance between rationality, ethics and aesthetics was truly far away: while the public used their chance asking where to put the money, Danny Quah, the expert in economics from the LSE, simply recommended the Golf Countries without the slightest sign of regret.

This crisis will be solved, no doubt. But the risk of not rectifying our mentality is going to be the prevalence of the political version of the Gresham Law John Gray exposed in his False Dawn: bad capitalism is going to expel good one. By the way, Gray thinks that this is not just another crisis but the fall of USA just as the Soviet Union did when the Berlin Wall came down. Here is the article at The Guardian in which he says so few days ago.